WITII THE EXCEPTION of lawn tennis, athletics is the sport
which seems to breed the greatest number of prima donnas; and Melbourne must by now have had its fill of them. Quite the worst offender on this occasion was Mr. Jack Crump, the manager of the British team. There was no excuse, when things were going badly with a team, for his wail of self-pity; his time would have been better spent in preventing the sillier apologias of his team members rather than thinking up some of his own. I cannot help wondering what would have been said if Chris Brasher's disqualification had not been reversed on appeal; imagination reels at the thought of what the sports writers would have written for the next morning's newspapers —considering what they wrote about other less spectacular reverses. Incidentally, can anybody suggest a reason why so many events were won by athletes whose summer records had been undistinguished? Brasher, I understand, had never beaten his two fellow-countrymen previously; Johnson. the half-miler, had shown very poor form in England during the past few months; and Delaney, the winner of the 1,500 metres, had been suffering a succession of humiliating defeats. Presumably there is a point beyond which physical prepara- tion helps no further: it is the triumph over mental strain which matters.
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